Totemic Studies
2018 - Director : Centre national de la danse, Réalisation
Choreographer(s) : Barbin, Matthieu (France)
Present in collection(s): CN D - Spectacles et performances
Video producer : Centre national de la danse
Totemic Studies
2018 - Director : Centre national de la danse, Réalisation
Choreographer(s) : Barbin, Matthieu (France)
Present in collection(s): CN D - Spectacles et performances
Video producer : Centre national de la danse
Totemic Studies
What would be my Totem in the current context of the end of the world? How to move the usual definition in my own perspective? An old tradition sees in any solo a concern for self-portrait, subject of the streched thread between an individual and a community of spectators.”
In Totemic Studies, Matthieu Barbin treats that troubled point in which the violence and the enjoyment of being gazed on, are intertwined. The spectrum of his Totembecomes a matter of contemporary representations. By handling a multiplicity of compositional processes such as speeches, words, reflexions about the solo exercice, craft practices, and exploiting both their functional aspects and their heterotopic capacities, he activates and deconstructs the categories of his visibility. “Take this is my body.” It will be all about that. A body forced to manipulate a bunch of tools in order to find figures through which it can identify himself. Twisting in all directions the dialectic of looking and being looked, he engages himself in a game of putting on/off, unveiling the layers of his social and performative constructions and at the end making fun of himself. Because it’s also about questioning this ritual, sometimes absurd, never pointless, about a performer who puts himself in a spectacular spectrum, who summons an audience, a space, a situation then who tries to extract himself from it. Slipping between abstraction and eroticism, Matthieu Barbin becomes object and subject, totem and taboo, mirror and caricature of his time.
Source: program of the CND
Barbin, Matthieu
Matthieu Barbin is an artist, performer. He is also a drag queen under the name of Sara Forever. Invited by Hortense Archambault and Vincent Baudriller, he participated in the Kadmos research group as part of the 2013 Avignon Festival. In 2018, he created his first piece, the solo totemic studies, small portraits. The piece will be performed in many festivals. The same year, he created the performance Dans les bras de Bobby. In 2020 he created The hundred thousand last quarters of an hour. His work is based in particular on the superimposition of virtuosity and oral physicalities, relying on various supports that he twists in multiple directions in order to go deep into a plastic stretching of the bodies and characters crossed. Often working with intimate materials as a starting point, he expands them to embrace a wide range of absorbed and reincarnated bodies or uncertain, intermediate definitions through which the absurd can sometimes emerge.
Centre national de la danse, Réalisation
Since 2001, the National Center for Dance (CND) has been making recordings of its shows and educational programming and has created resources from these filmed performances (interviews, danced conferences, meetings with artists, demonstrations, major lessons, symposia specialized, thematic arrangements, etc.).
Totemic Studies
Artistic direction / Conception : Matthieu Barbin
Choreography : Matthieu Barbin
Interpretation : Matthieu Barbin
Set design : Célia Gondol, Alicia Zaton, Matthieu Barbin
Text : Jonathan Drillet
Original music : Edit et mix Fany Corral et Florent Frossard - Consulting musique Fany Corral
Lights : Fabrice Ollivier
Costumes : Marine Peyraud
Other collaborations : Entrainement Vocal Dalila Kathir
Production / Coproduction of the choreographic work : Production Fanny Virelizier / THE POST POST. Coproduction Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis. Pour cette pièce, Matthieu Barbin a reçu le soutien de la DRAC Île-de-France dans le cadre de l’aide au projet. Matthieu Barbin est candidat FoRTE 2018. Spectacle créé au CN D le 22.05.2018 dans le cadre du festival des Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis.
Production / Coproduction of the video work : Enregistré au CND le 24 mai 2018 dans le cadre du festival des Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis
Duration : 67 minutes
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